The need for smaller, higher performance, and more complex electronic devices increases dramatically with each new generation of device. Accordingly the complexity of the process of designing and fabricating semiconductor materials necessary to meet these needs has also increased. With this increase in complexity has come an increase in cost. This increase in cost is due in large part to the critical need for optimal material selection and processing in the semiconductor design and fabrication process. As the demanded complexity increases, the materials required to provide this desired complexity become increasingly critical.
Design and process engineers must know how the materials that they select for fabrication behave under the changing parameters of the fabrication process. To obtain accurate data concerning property values for the materials that they are dealing with, the designers must manually search through many sources of information. Often the available sources do not contain complete or sufficiently accurate information. As a result design engineers rely on trial-and-error fabrication runs to gain experience concerning how the selected materials behave under changing process parameters.
As the complexity of the devices required continues to increase, this approach of using many time and resource consuming design-fabricate-test iterations becomes increasingly cost prohibitive.
In view of the foregoing, it is apparent that a need exists for a thin film material modeling and analysis tool that can reduce the cost involved with designing, fabricating, and testing a semiconductor or Micro-Electrical-Mechanical (MEMS) device by reducing the number of design-fabricate-test iterations necessary to yield the desired characteristics. Central to such an analysis tool is a readily available and accurate database of measured data regarding the properties of the materials involved in fabrication. Such an analysis tool would allow the designer to reduce the number of iterations in the design process by accurately modeling the design-fabricate-test process without actually fabricating and testing the devices. Such a tool would create a much needed savings in both time, materials, and cost.